Grandview
by redwallanderson
Summary: A girl finds out that zombies aren't the only enemies that rise during a worldwide outbreak. Some people can be cruel masters.
1. Chapter 1

**Prologue**

The young girl -- seventeen, green eyes, flowing red hair, beautiful -- stood on the back porch of the house, staring out at the flaming debris of the rescue helicopter scattered all over what had once been her back yard. It felt like hours that she stared at the wreckage, but it could only have been a few seconds in reality. After those few seconds, the girl's explosion-shocked ears picked up the sound of a shuffling footstep across the yard.

"Zombies."

The single contemptuous word was spat from the girl's mouth with the hatred that could burn through a person if it was unleashed enough. She switched her gaze from the downed helicopter to the shirtless, swaying form that was struggling to climb over the ruined remnants of the chain-link fence that had once bordered the yard's edges. Hungry wails were now emitting from the shape, which couldn't be firmly distinguished from this distance.

With apparent boredom painted across her blank face, the girl raised the pistol that dangled loosely from her right hand and squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times as she aimed in the general direction of the shape, which recoiled from the shots and toppled half-over the fence. Strolling past the crashed helicopter, the girl aimed the pistol once more as the shape struggled to its feet. She aimed at the zombie's head, pointed and squeezed and it instantly dropped and didn't move.

She turned and looked at the ruins of the chopper and sighed, tossing the now-empty pistol aside as the hungry moans of other zombies surrounded her on all sides. She was ready.

**Chapter One**

Karina scanned the bleachers, eyes grim even as the audience cheered. She sighed sadly when she saw that her boyfriend Billy wasn't in the stands. He had promised. Billy KNEW that this was the championship girls' basketball game of the entire year and he KNEW how important it was to Karina. He had promised not to go party with his friends, but instead to come to the game.

She paused to dab a tear away before running back onto the basketball court after the signal was given that half-time was over. When the round began, Karina was still pissed off and she used her anger, aggressively gaining the ball from the other team and bulling her way past the other enemy players, dodging like a madwoman and leaping towards the goal desperately.

One of the other players grabbed her leg in revenge and Karina let out a high-pitched scream as she hit the gym floor facefirst and rolled over, blood gushing from her nose and mouth almost immediately. The ball rolled away, but the game had already basically halted as concerned players came running over.

"You little bitch!" Karina yelled, struggling as people held her down. The girl that had grabbed her leg just flashed a practiced smile and bent to tie her shoelaces. Karina kicked upwards into her face and laughed as the girl staggered backward into the bleachers.

The other girl was fast, though. She rolled quickly and came up yelling. "You slut! You did NOT just kick me!"

"I did, you fucking psycho!" Karina yelled back and the two girls were separated and taken to the principal's office and the game continued meanwhile. Karina sat at the opposite end of the office, dabbing at the blood leaking from her lip and nose and glaring at the girl who was sitting on the other end texting happily.

"She's sorry," the principal said impatiently for the fifth time. "Now stop this conflict or you'll both have to be temporarily suspended." He paused, looking between Karina and the other girl. _Wouldn't be surprised if the old guy starts to get a stiffy every time he looks at some sweet little ass in a basketball uniform_, Karina thought as she pretended to gag at the thought. The guy was in his late thirties, at least. The principal -- a man with the last name of Levins -- cast Karina a warning glare when she gagged. "You. You're lucky I don't suspend you either way! You may act sweet as sugar but I know you're good for nothing. Fighting during the championship game. You two should be ashamed of yourselves. I ought to---"

The phone rang and Levins groaned and relaxed, rubbing his sweaty brow quickly before picking up the phone. He rolled his eyes uncharacteristically and the girl sitting across the room giggled under her breath.

"I can't talk about that right now," Levins was muttering into the phone. He listened for a moment. "Yeah. Wouldn't you like to know?" Eyes wide. "Don't be silly. Is she conscious?" He stiffened in amazement. "Get them all inside. All of the students, right now. No, I'm not overreacting." He sighed and listened more on the phone. "Let me sort it out. I'll go confront the drunk myself. I don't want a bunch of bullshit getting out in the media about how I let some drunk guy just walk into a school, a school where half the students are beautiful young girls." Levins' eyes roamed over Karina. "Alright," he finished to the person on the another end of the phone line, before hanging up.

He looked at the pair of girls in silence for a few seconds. "Some drunk guy approached the students in the gym jogging department while they were out on the football field and he just randomly grabbed one of the girls and bit into her neck before all of the students could be evacuated inside. We tried to call for an ambulance but oddly, all of the lines were busy. She's conscious in the nurse's office but we don't know what's wrong with her other than the bite wound. I am going to go to confront the drunk. Stay put, please."

A few moments after Levins departed through the office door, the other girl sitting opposite Karina peeked her head out through the door as well, looking over her shoulder. "He's gone now, _loca_," the girl commented with a wink. Karina suddenly noticed that the girl was Hispanic.

Karina sighed. "My name's Karina Bush."

The other girl nodded. "My name's Brianna." Without another word, the girl turned and barged through the door and out of the office with Karina hot on her heels. The scene they emerged out into was one straight from an old zombie movie. Wails of hunger echoed through the hallway and three or four people staggered drunkenly down the hallway in every direction and... there was Billy, dodging through the drunk people!

"Billy!" Karina yelled, suddenly overjoyed as she ran to meet him, and he grabbed her up in a tight embrace, kissing her hard. She was happy but confused. "I thought you were breaking up with me or something!"

Billy didn't seem to hear her or even notice the dried blood on her nose and mouth. He was already babbling out his own story. Karina suddenly noticed that blood seemed to be trickling down one side of his head and he looked like he was dizzy. "We... We were at a party and... Windows broke. Lights went out. Screaming and some people were dead. They didn't stay dead. We left. Car crashed, by the post office. Walked here. Had to get you. I love you so much."

Brianna raised her eyebrows from where she stood by the couple. "I admire your passion, boy, but . . . That is crazy! You're a fucking nutjob! Fuck you, man!" she remarked and she seemed to believe it until she turned and looked straight into the face of one of the 'drunk people' nearby at the same moment as he bit her on the arm. It was -- or had been -- Ryan Cohen, one of the boys who probably thought about her while he masturbated. Basically a nerdy guy. Half of his face was gone and one eyeball was drooping out of the socket. He wasn't just drunk. This guy was dead. Except, there was one problem with that theory. He was still walking, too. Brianna turned to Billy, shocked and in pain. "What the hell is that thing?" she asked incredulously, clutching her wounded arm.

In response, Billy ran toward Ryan Cohen and pushed blindly. The zombie went flying backwards and bounced off the wall, crumpling. Billy spat down at the zombie's face and turned to Brianna. "If you want to know what that thing is, get down there and find out. I'm leaving."

As they had conversed, six more of the zombie-like figures had staggered into the hallway and were basically surrounding them. Billy shoved them backwards but for every one that fell, another took its place from the rooms and offshoot hallways in every direction.

"Come on, move it!" a voice boomed behind them. The stairway door had been pulled open and there stood none other than Principal Levins. A bloody bite wound shredded his upper right bicep and he looked pissed off. "Hurry the fuck up! It's just a scratch. Come on, let's go!"

Levins, Billy, Brianna and Karina turned and hurried up a flight of stairs, the door clanging shut behind them. They emerged onto the rain-drenched rooftop within seconds, the hungry moans of zombies echoing up the stairs behind them.

"You're kidding right?" Billy was -- of course -- the first to speak. "Now we're not trapped in a hallway. We're trapped on a roof, thirty feet above ground. Yay. Good idea, you fucking dick." He stared hostilely at Levins.

The principal opened his mouth to return an argument but before he could, they all whirled around to watch the doorknob rattling. The zombies had already reached the door. Some of them were faster than others, apparently. They all backed up to the edge of the roof, staring apprehensively at the shaking door.

"Is... Is there any way we could survive a leap from this roof?" Levins asked.

"No fucking way," Brianna whispered. All her feistiness was gone. She was scared out of her mind. She didn't want to die yet. At that point, finally, the door burst open and twenty, forty, sixty zombies piled out onto the roof. Teachers, students, passerby, police officers, there were all kinds. They were all hungry, too.

Karina was the one that spotted the chopper in the distance, flying over a patch of highway where smoke was boiling up into the sky. _Probably a big car pileup, definitely caused by zombies_, was Karina's thought. She began waving her arms and jumping up and down, heedless of the inexorably slow approach of the zombies behind. "We're down here!" she screamed. "HELP!"

The sound of rotor blades grew louder as the helicopter approached. It came in low above the roof of the high school as the man sitting in the half-open doorway of the craft started firing the shotgun he carried. Zombies toppled like ninepins and the man shouted for the four people at the roof's edge to climb aboard. Karina and Brianna went first -- apparently the principal and Billy were gentlemen to the end -- and Karina climbed inside with no trouble at all, but as Brianna mounted the chopper, the man wielding the shotgun shoved her back off.

"You're infected," he yelled pitilessly. "The bites." He scanned the two males quickly and nodded. "The old guy is, too." He pointed at the bite on Levins' bicep. "They're not coming."

"Are you fucking shitting me?" Brianna yelled, groaning as she got back up to her feet on the roof. She was crying: angry tears and fearful tears. She stared past the face of the shotgun-wielding man and spotted Karina. "Do me a favor! If you ever find my mom or my dad, tell them I love them." She took two steps backward and stared absently out at the sun setting on the horizon. Billy looked from Karina to Levins to the chopper and stood there unmoving. It was obvious that he was going to stay, as well. He probably was infected, too, somewhere underneath his clothes.

Karina attempted to push her way off of the helicopter to join her boyfriend but the shotgun guy held her back. "You're staying with us," he yelled. "We're going to save somebody from this hellhole."

"I love him!" she shrieked into the guy's ear but he didn't let her past as the helicopter began rising from the rooftop. "You son of a bitch!"

At one hundred feet, Karina managed to shove past the guy suicidally but he held on to the back of her basketball uniform and she stared downward in utter shock at the trio of bodies falling -- no, _jumping_ -- from the edge of the roof.

"Would you want that?" the shotgunner whispered in her ear, also watching the sight and stroking her hair. "Now, you're going with us. There's too many of them down there and besides, your buddies are dead now." Biting her lip against the wave of anguish and loss shaking her entire being, Karina sat back into the helicopter's rough seats, and barely felt the shotgunner buckling her in securely. "Thank you, sweetheart. Thatta girl."

He made her take some kind of pill and Karina drifted off to sleep. The helicopter flew onwards . . . towards Karina's soon-to-be new home: Grandview Hospital.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Karina yawned as she awoke from what seemed to be the deepest sleep she'd ever fallen into. She looked around to find herself laying on the sofa in a cramped little apartment in only her undergarments -- bra and panties, basically. The redheaded teen was already weirded-out enough being half-naked in a strange place and the fact that the blood crusted around her nose and mouth had been cleaned off by someone. She was even more startled when she heard somebody open the door behind her and she rolled over, pulling up a nearby blanket to cover herself.

"Exscuse us, ma'am," one of the soldiers -- who had also been on the helicopter, apparently -- said with a half-respectful, half-perverted leer towards her. "The chopper's refueling and we stopped near an abandoned civilian airfield on the other side of the city and this apartment building was conveniently near that airport so . . . The captain ordered us to make sure you got here and ordered us to make sure that . . . " He leered again. "That you were comfortable."

"Who the fuck are you?" The blunt question ripped from Karina's mouth before she could stop herself. She didn't trust these guys. They just . . . seemed shady.

The soldier looked at his other two companions and grinned unpleasantly before turning back to face her and snapping to attention with a salute. "Lieutenant Richy Scoggs, ma'am. These men are my buddies, Private Joe Seever and Sergeant Fred Turken. We uh . . . " He held up Karina's wallet, 'liberated' from her purse which had been dangling from his hand. "We know your name. Karina. That's a pretty name, ma'am."

Karina glared at him but forced herself to stay calm, biting her already-swollen lip. She remembered Billy's death and the death of the others but she couldn't dwell on that, because it it was just too painful. Karina did use some of that genuine pain to secure her freedom, however. "Those things . . . they caused my boyfriend and everyone else at my school to die." She forced herself to begin crying quietly.

Lieutenant Scoggs -- a tall blonde man in his early thirties -- shook his head sadly, pretending to mourn, too. "Yes, ma'am, and they also killed the president a few hours ago in Washington, and most of the other people in the world. You did the right thing, coming with us and all." He spoke as if Karina had actually _chosen_ to 'tag along'. "Your friends wouldn't be any better off if you had died with them, and besides . . . " He smiled that unpleasant smile once more and narrowed what Karina now noticed were big blue eyes. "You are prettier than that Latina chick was, anyways."

Karina smiled grimly through the fake tears, and forced herself with every piece of courage left -- she finally managed to put a flirtatious curl to her lips and a wink in her beautiful green eyes and she was nearly ready to begin the first phase of her escape attempt when the interruption came.

It came in the form of a man shoving through the door that the soldiers had entered from, as well. The man shoved aside the leering private and staring sergeant and grabbed Scoggs by the shirt, shaking him violently. "She's sixteen or seventeen, definitely not eighteen, man! What are you doing, Scoggs? You fucking coward! That's sick! If it becomes my decision, you little weasel, you won't see the light of day any longer." The man, who looked older than Scoggs or the other two soldiers, turned to Karina with a genuine smile on his lips. He had a kind face and gentle brown eyes and he extended a hand towards Karina as if to help her up from where she was laying on the sofa. "We need to find your clothes, young lady."

Apparently chastised, Scoggs passed over a set of clothes to the older man, murmuring empty apologies and still leering towards Karina. Instead of replying, Karina just silently took the clothes and crouched on the other side of the sofa with the blanket still wrapped tightly around her, getting dressed under the blanket with some difficulty.

When she was done dressing, the older man -- who Karina now assumed was Captain Nicholas Grattzey because of the nametag on his jacket -- frowned thoughtfully and turned to the soldiers who were apparently under his command. "Head out to the airfield. Now. Make sure to ask Dietri if the refueling is going well. Eyes open out there. Don't get caught unawares by those undead bastards -- pardon my French, missy." The soldiers left and the old man just stood staring down at Katrina where she crouched by the sofa.

The girl smiled hesitantly and stood up, fully clothed once more. "Those guys are nuttier than squirrel shit . . . sir. Especially that nutjob Scoggs. He looked like he wanted to ravage me."

Grattzey sighed and rubbed his eyes wearily. "Scoggs has had a hard day, as have we all. This . . . zombie thing is new for everybody, not just you. We're all scared and a little loopy and, well . . . Scoggs has seen far too many pornographic movies and he thinks he's basically Casanova in the flesh, just a little more perverted than the original. He'll get it over it or he'll regret it."

"Well . . . " Karina hesitated. "Call off your dogs in the future, alright? Completely. I don't want to be harassed. I've-I've had a hard day, too. My boyfriend . . . He . . . "

The Captain nodded and surprisingly drew the girl into a tight hug. "I know. I was there, remember? I was the man with the shotgun."

Karina backed away immediately, her forlorn hope that maybe at least _this_ guy wasn't wacko fading. "That was _you_?" She backed away more, into the wall, and grabbed the closest object -- an unplugged lamp. "Why didn't you let me get back out of the chopper?"

The Captain sighed and his kind demeanor instantly evaporated, replaced with a sneering pervert just like Scoggs. "You fucking cocktease! Are you as stupid as you look?" He paused, moving closer to the terrified girl. "I've never been much of a skirt-chaser but . . . Well, it's the end of the world. Might as well have some fun, right?"

Surprisingly, Karina was the first to snap into action, emboldened by the horrifying realization that the Captain had ordered the other soldiers away so that he could have 'first dibs' on her, the new meat. First. Meaning that the other men were going to have their turn as well. Karina couldn't -- _wouldn't_ -- allow that to happen. The girl swung the lamp's hard metal edge into the captain's lust-filled face with surprising energy and he toppled backwards and grabbed at his face. Blood squeezed between his fingers and the despicable man bellowed in agony and rage.

Driven by the thought of these insane 'soldiers' pounding away on top of her -- _in her_ -- Karina leaped over the couch and hit the ground running, shoving the door open and running down the hallway of the apartment building as fast as her bare feet could carry her. She reached the stairs at the very end of the hallway and turned to look at the half-open door of the apartment just in time to see the Captain barrel out. He leveled his pistol and Karina's heart nearly stopped in the few nanoseconds of hesitation before she dived to the floor.

A single gunshot rang out and the wall erupted as the bullet smashed into and through it. Karina could hear the Captain cursing angrily as he trotted down the hallway towards the stairs, muttering to himself, something about 'regret' and 'angelic beauty'. She turned and ran down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to shout back up. "You're a fucking nutjob!"

Grattzey reached the stairway's top faster than she expected and he fired the pistol. A cloud of splinters puffed up from the wall to the girl's right and she screamed and ducked, continuing to run down the next hallway. _A game of cat-and-mouse, apparently_, the Captain thought with a grin. "You fucked up real good, little lady!" he yelled, following the distant footsteps. "When I catch you, I'm going to put you in an embrace of agony, one so blisteringly painful that you won't ever recover."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Karina let out an involuntary shriek as another bullet whistled past her head. She had reached the first floor of the apartment building and she had somehow mostly managed to evade the insane gunman who was chasing her. There was a graze on the back of her left shoulder and her cheek had been stung by shrapnel when a bullet had hit a window that she had been running past. Only a few more feet to go and she would be out the door and into the open city. The zombies were no threat compared to the maniac behind her.

She had nearly reached the door leading out into the comparable freedom of the zombie-filled streets when it was slammed inward and the three younger soldiers dashed inside, along with the pilot -- who the Captain had called Dietri back in the apartment. Karina dodged right again and bounded past, but Scoggs blocked the door, his pistol outstretched. He appeared hesitant to kill her, but that was only because he wanted some before she died, of course.

Without hesitation and driven by the desperate need to escape, Karina turned and dived right through the bank of windows by the blocked door, just as Scoggs lunged forward and missed, toppling over a couch. Fortunately, the window Karina had aimed for shattered and she rolled through with cuts all over her shoulders and face. She came up running though. The Captain ran to the shattered window and delicately slid through, aiming the pistol at the fleeing girl's back and pulling the trigger. The pistol clicked empty.

"Get that bitch!" Grattzey screamed over his shoulder, stuffing the empty handgun into his waistband and dashing after Karina, with his hungry gaze fixed on the back of her head. "She's heading toward the bridge! Cut her off at the overpass, Scoggs!" His voice sounded excited now. There was a chance to catch her alive!

Karina dodged through what would have been a reasonably busy highway before the zombie outbreak, breathless and bleeding, tired and scared. She ignored the gasping moans all around her, shoving the slow-moving zombies aside and simply avoiding the faster sprinting zombies. She stopped only once for breath at the top of a sheer hill around a corner of the highway, looking back over her shoulder, chest heaving as she struggled to breathe. The Captain was clambering over a pickup truck that had smashed head-on into a van sometime during the outbreak itself. Shivering at the sight of the obvious lunatic, Karina turned and began running again and the chase continued in earnest.

She clambered over the safety rail separating the one street from another, which headed up towards an overpass which was ominously clear of zombies. She had already run onto the overpass itself when she saw the phony grin and deceptively handsome face of Scoggs where he stood with the other two soldiers and the pilot, waiting for her in the middle of the overpass with their high-powered rifles aimed at her. She turned to run and saw the Captain wheezing up to a halt further down the street. They had caught her in a classic pincer movement somehow.

"Come over to me, you little bitch," Grattzey croaked. He hadn't run that much since his days on the high-school track team and that had been a very long time ago. This girl was going to pay for that. "We saved your life on that school roof and now you owe us. Come here!" The last two words were a roar as the Captain limped forward, simultaneously slapping a new clip into the handgun.

Karina gave 'the ultimate fuck you', turning and diving over the edge of the overpass. Some people would claim that it was the smartest move she had ever made. However, there was no way Karina could have known the abandoned semi was parked below the overpass. She couldn't have known. She had just taken a chance and had gotten lucky. Karina landed on the top of the semi trailer and grunted with the impact, staring back up at the overpass with the enraged faces of the soldiers peering down at her.

"Shoot that little slut!" Grattzey's hoarse voice rang out.

The sounds of the rifles thundering were deafening and definitely enough to motivate Karina to roll over the side of the semi trailer just as bullets smashed into the spot where she had been crouching. She landed on the shoulder of the highway with a grunt, rolling to her feet and continuing to run with bullets smashing into the ground all around her. Every muscle in her body ached, and strangely at the moment the only thoughts in her head were how, just a few days before, her only worries were her boyfriend and how to raise money to go to the Rihanna concert that was coming up.

Grattzey sighed as the soldiers kept shooting even after Karina had disappeared down the highway safely. He shoved the hot barrels of the rifle aside. "No more shooting!" the Captain ordered through gritted teeth. Blood boiled through his veins at the thought that a mere _girl_ had defeated him so soundly. "You won't get away with this, bitch," he murmured, staring at the spot where the girl had disappeared.

"What was that, sir?" Turken asked dully, inserting a new magazine into his rifle as he spoke. He merely earned a slap across the face from Grattzey.

"Nothing, you idiot!" the Captain shouted. "Get back to the chopper before I blow your worthless, pathetic brain out of your thick skull. Get away from me! Double time!"

Turken rubbed his chin and looked at Scoggs, Seever and Dietri for support but they just shrugged and headed back towards the chopper obediently. Turken hastily followed, lest the captain hit him again. The Captain stared out towards the interstate below for another long moment before sighing and shaking his head and following as well.

---------

Karina lifted herself up onto the dented hood of the Honda, attempting to pull her sock delicately off of what she suspected was a sprained ankle. Wincing from the pain, Karina looked around at the zombies making their way through the crashed cars around her and realized that without a gun or some other protection out here alone, she was as good as dead. She took a deep breath and slid off the car's hood, limping gingerly with the zombies grabbing at and narrowly missing her every few seconds.


	4. Author's Note

_**AUTHOR'S NOTE**_

Thank you for the reviews, guys. Don't give up on the morality of the soldiers yet.


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Karina hissed a frustrated sigh through gritted teeth as she passed the smoking remains of what had apparently once been a fire truck, smashed into the side of an embankment by the highway. She scanned the horizon desperately but all she saw was the same thing that she had seen the past few painstakingly limped miles: zombies, zombies, zombies. Zombies that were moaning with frantic hunger and clawing for her soft flesh. Hordes of the things.

Karina slowed to a stop in the middle of the interstate, however, despite the zombies. She barely even noticed them at that moment. Instead, she was gaping in joyful amazement at the beat-up old pickup truck swerving through the little clumps of undead. The vehicle was now so streaked by gore and coagulated blood that it was impossible to tell what its original coat of paint had been colored. It pulled to a stop in front of her and the driver leaned out of the half-open driver-side window and grinned at her past the cigar dangling out of the side of his mouth.

"Are you coming with us or not?" the man asked with a raised eyebrow. Karina ignored him and looked past his shoulder but all she saw was a scared woman and two children in the back of the pickup truck. The woman was holding a shotgun and fending off any zombies that got close enough to the sides of the truckbed. Karina nodded and climbed into the back with the woman and the pickup truck peeled out without hesitation and continued merrily on its way.

The other woman -- much older than Karina, probably in her late twenties at least -- was the first to speak. She pointed to the newcomer's wounds with the shotgun. "Who did that?" When Karina looked confused, the woman sighed and handed over a grimy mirror.

Karina wiped it off uselessly on her equally grimy shirt before peering into the mirror. Her bottom lip was badly swollen, her cheek had a nasty shrapnel cut running along it, and she had less serious cuts all over her shoulders and face from the daring dive through the window back at the apartment building. Not to mention the sprained ankle, which hurt more than all the other wounds put together.

She sighed and looked back up, handing the mirror back and meeting the other woman's gaze. "I'm Karina Bush and the men that did this to me were---" She paused before identifying the men as 'soldiers' but decided that those men certainly weren't worthy of the title and she managed a humorless sneer. "The men that did this to me were bandits. Thank you very much for picking me up. Who are you people?"

"Veronica," the woman responded simply. "The little boy and girl here are Zeke and Frances. They're not my kids but we picked them up from the refugee center we were at. We evacuated right before the center got overrun." Veronica took a deep breath and shook her head violently, as if trying to banish the memory of that incident. She looked through the shattered back window of the truck, at the man who was driving through the zombies and watching them in the rear-view mirror. He was probably listening, too. She took another deep breath. "That's Ed. He had this pickup truck and I had found these two abandoned kids and, well . . . I convinced him to take us and here we are."

Karina nodded, struggling to absorb all of that information and then she spoke as well. "Have you got any other weapons beside that scattergun?" She indicated the shotgun cradled like a baby - protectively - in Veronica's arms as she spoke.

Ed the Cigar Man seemed to have heard the question. With his free hand, he held up a gun just enough to show the slide locked back on the pistol. It was empty. "I'm going to keep it in case we find more bullets for it, though. Other than that shotgun, we have no loaded guns."

Karina nodded once more and then her swollen lips curved into a genuine grin. "What if I could get us a chopper?"

------------

"No way, sir."

Grattzey sighed and rubbed his weary, insane eyes with his thumb while his pistol dangled limply at his side from the other hand. "What do you mean 'no way', Dietri?" he asked in a falsely sweet, falsely patient voice. "You had better not mean 'no way' as in 'no way, Captain, this chopper is fucked'. If that's how you meant it, then I should just kill you now, because there's not exactly a place to get ANOTHER CHOPPER around here, you FUCKING IDIOT!"

Dietri recoiled from the maddened rage of his superior, trembling. He waited until Grattzey had mostly calmed down before uncurling from his semi-fetal position and responding. "No, of course not, Captain," he replied hastily in heavily accented English. "I can get it off the ground for sure, but it will not get beyond this city, sir. I think we need more fuel. If we don't get fuel, this thing is a sitting duck pretty much."

Grattzey struggled to maintain his temper, gripping the pistol in an iron-tight grip. "Dietri . . . You can't exactly go dumpster diving for helicopter fuel, you imbecile! There has to be something we can do to create some sort of alternate fuel!" Dietri shook his head and Grattzey nearly lost it completely. He slammed the butt of the pistol into the foreign pilot's face and held him against the chopper with his hand tight around the man's neck. "Find helicopter fuel or I am going to feed you to the zombies. Piece. By. Piece. Start walking. Take Seever."

Choking and spitting, Dietri staggered away. He coughed weakly and nodded. "Yes, Captain. I will find you exactly what you deserve. I promise." He grabbed Seever's arm and had a brief whispered conversation. They both exchanged furtive glances towards the Captain and then saluted respectfully before heading off away down the street, apparently towards the main airport across the city.

Grattzey sighed once more. "It's hard to find good help these days, eh?" he asked the empty air, leaning against the chopper and lighting up a joint.


End file.
